I used to wonder if I was good in bed. I used to wonder how to be good in bed.

It’s obsessive. The way they show fucking in movies: excessive, in twenty-second bursts and flashes of skin. The way they show fucking in pornography: rapid, in long minutes and forgettable looks, personalities, noises.

It’s weird: fucking, in real life. It’s this dance that both of you don’t understand because it didn’t exist before either of you came together. It’s not a waltz, a tango, or some oddly distinctive, gritty club dancing. It’s your body meeting another, making something that has never been before.

What they don’t tell you is that all of it is right–slow and quick and the speeds inbetween.

I used to wonder what I would have to fuck like to keep you. What the girls before me had to do wrong to lose you; what the girls after me will have to do right to keep you.

What people don’t want to believe is that the choice you made to leave or stay was done long before you’ve ever known what I was like in bed. What I didn’t want to believe was that the right or wrong these girls do will never have anything to do with your eighteen-hundred thread count, Egyptian sheets.

So now, when people ask me how to be good in bed, I remember you–and I tell them it doesn’t matter.

You fuck like you are. The way you kiss; the way you touch. Your rhythm, the way you fight to keep your body electric. You can put your hands around them like you did the one before; you can use your lips like the books taught you, flick your tongue like you were once told–but it’s all just you, and the only truth is that the decision to keep you around was made long before the decision to take you to bed.

People will taste you before they taste you. Chemical reactions are greater than physical ones. The convincing you make with your head is stronger than the convincing you can make with your head.

You can’t fuck someone in love with you; you can’t make love on a one-way.

I remember you–and the only good in bed was the kind shared with you in the mornings after: three-hundred-and-sixty-five days of the year.